The first question every new librarian at Alexandria asks is, "Why is the library so tall?" The shelves are all standard height, the topmost books in easy arm's reach; but the ceiling is high overhead, the slender columns that support it looking impossibly stretched. "It's such a waste of space," they say. "Why didn't they just add a second floor?"

That question lasts until their first night shift; until the first time they step through the doors and see the ghostly stacks of the ancients, the burned and lost scrolls of two thousand years of Libraries of Alexandria.

And when the rest of the librarians return in the morning, the new initiate always has the same question for them: "Why is the library so short?"